Here’s USV principal’s Fred Wilson’s comment, via email: “Union Square Ventures is very fortunate to be able to add Andy Weissman to our partnership and we think he is a perfect fit for the entrepreneurs we want to work with and the sectors we want to participate in.” (More below.)

That will cause a small ripple in startupland, because Weissman was the one steering Betaworks’ investment portfolio. His partner John Borthwick handled the operational parts of the business, which has founded and/or nurtured startups like Summize, TweetDeck, Chartbeat and Bitly.

With Weissman’s departure, Betaworks’s focus will change. “Though we will continue to do seed stage investments, our primary focus will be on building the core capabilities of the companies that we acquire and grow in-house,” Borthwick said told his employees via email today. Betabeat first reported the news.

What Borthwick didn’t explain in his email is that he and Weissman had previously planned on raising a “sidecar fund” that would essentially split Betaworks into two businesses: An operating company run by Borthwick and an early-stage VC shop run by Weissman.

But that plan was discarded this summer, at least in part because of opposition from Betaworks’ investors, who include RRE Ventures, Intel, AOL and the New York Times. Investors argued that they had put money into a company where investing was only a component of the plan, not a full-time occupation; by raising a new investment fund, they argued, Betaworks would essentially be competing against some of its backers.

People familiar with the company say that the plan’s collapse didn’t lead directly to Weissman’s departure. But the backstory does provide context to his move to become a full-time venture capitalist.

When Weissman lands at Union Square, he’ll have plenty of money to work with. The firm, which has made a series of lucrative bets in high-profile Web 2.0 start-ups including Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare and Tumblr, is in the midst of raising a new $150-$200 million fund.

Four-year-old Betaworks, which now has more than 80 employees, ought to have plenty of money to work with, too. In addition to the $28 million it has raised to date, the company has also been able to turn some of its investments into cash via secondary market sales.

Most notably, it has recently sold Twitter shares it acquired in 2008, when the company bought search engine Summize. That alone should provide a nice cushion for Betaworks if it needs it: Twitter’s value has shot up from $100 million to $8.4 billion over the last three years.

And speaking of ripples, here’s one I’m guessing Weissman may enjoy:

Brown, who had helped negotiate many of Facebook’s so-called “talent acquisitions” is to be Twitter’s director of corporate development and will report to Kevin Thau, VP of business development. He starts today, Twitter confirmed.

While the issue of insider trading of private companies is a sensitive one, Twitter was apparently able to see Brown’s side of the story.

Brown had purchased Facebook shares on the secondary market last fall out of an apparent desire to take a bigger stake in the company he pitched to many entrepreneurs. Facebook fired him in February based on its policy against insider trading by employees.

Brown stayed out of the spotlight until a report about him surfaced that suggested the stock purchase for which he was fired was based on knowledge of Facebook’s coming $1.5 billion funding round from Goldman Sachs. In a public statement, Brown admitted to the stock purchase but said he had “absolutely no knowledge” of the Goldman Sachs funding.

According to sources, Brown had also been in talks with Google about a role on its corporate development team before accepting the job at Twitter. After Brown was fired, Facebook hired Google corp dev executive Amin Zoufonoun.

That Twitter is hiring Brown presumably means it will step up its efforts to make acquisitions. The company has previously made something like seven start-up purchases, most of them quite small, including Summize, Mixer Labs, Atebits and Smallthought Systems.

It’s also notable that Brown has jumped to Twitter, given it is one of Facebook’s main rivals. (According to LinkedIn, there are 11 former Facebook employees who currently work at Twitter.)

Brown (like many other new Twitter hires, in our experience!) has recently stepped up his tweeting, with eight tweets in the last month or so compared to zero in the year before. He tweets at @mikeisbrown.

Prior to joining Facebook in 2009, Brown had been a venture capitalist with Foundation Capital and Partech International. He is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Goldman offered the news in a conversation at LeWeb, saying he’d maintain an advisory role, that he’s not leaving to start something new, that he’s not going to Facebook or Google and that he just needs “a bit of a break.”

Twitter has no lack of product leaders, including co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams, who recently relinquished the top job to make room for former COO Dick Costolo. Goldman had been a close friend of Williams, having first joined him as business manager of blogging software maker Pyra Labs, before it was bought by Google in 2003. Goldman has led product at Twitter since 2007.

Following Goldman’s departure announcement, a company spokeswoman said that Williams “is going to continue in his co-founder role and help with product vision.” She said that it was not yet clear whether the new head of product management would be an internal or external hire.

But, no surprise, sources familiar with the situation said Williams will likely assume the top product role, as it’s the best-fitting landing place for him at the company. The Twitter service was originally created in 2006 by company co-founder and Chairman Jack Dorsey and others when Williams was CEO of a previous start-up called Odeo. Dorsey left his operating role at Twitter in 2008 when Williams replaced him as CEO.

As the company verges on raising funding that would value the company at $3.5 to $4 billion, the departure of Goldman seems to underscore an issue that has plagued Twitter for a long time: Product development.

Aside from its well-documented reliability problems, new products and major upgrades at Twitter are few and far between.

While it is clear the people who founded and now lead Twitter have been passionate and visionary about personal expression and information-sharing in its simplest form, many techies say they are given pause by Twitter’s deficit of innovation since its first and most powerful iteration.

They assert that Twitter’s product launches to date–retweets, lists, some apps and its #newtwitter Web interface–are minor complements to the simple messaging system. In a tech culture that values shiny new toys, multiple people have said to me that Twitter is the least innovative of any other Internet contemporary.

For example, Twitter still doesn’t offer image hosting or its own link shortener, and still has yet to fully incorporate the search service Summize, which it bought in 2008. Perhaps that’s out of concern for displacing and angering its developer corps of companies, like Bit.ly, but since 25 percent of Tweets contain links, it seems obvious that Twitter should help its users shorten them to help fit into its 140-character limit.

The company tried to set a firm road map last April at Chirp, its first developer conference (pictured at left, the dudes of Twitter held a jokey Q&A session at Chirp).

But since then, eagerly awaited products like “Annotations” (a way to add more information to Tweets) have been delayed as the company concentrated on dealing with World Cup traffic and the release of its new Web site. Twitter is hiring as fast as it can, with its ballooning employee count, now at 325, relatively small for a product now used by eight percent of American online adults.

Still, many laud the sleek new Twitter Web site–for which Goldman, Williams and product manager Kevin Cheng led development. It was rolled out to admirable acclaim and user satisfaction.

But Twitter has only a few weeks to shuffle things around before it launches into the new year with no formal leader of its product team.

Yesterday–presumably so as not to be left out of the dueling press gatherings that Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and Facebook have all had in recent weeks to show off fancy new stuff–Twitter lobbed out an an invite for an event this afternoon:

We’d like to invite you to come to Twitter HQ for an event tomorrow afternoon (Sept 14)…Please be there by 3:45pm. RSVP below.

See you there.

So, what, oh, what are those little elves at the microblogging service going to show off?

It could be a lot of things, from a new advertising shiny object to the results of recent promoted tweet efforts to updated mobile products.

Or perhaps it is introducing some more video capability into its tweets.

And maybe Twitter bought some pretty little start-up or is annoying a whole new fascist country.

So, because BoomTown always reads to the last page of mysteries to get to the ending first, here is my best spoiler guess of what Twitter could announce: An updated search offering.

Well, at least, I hope the company will finally fill in what has become what I consider to be one of the very biggest holes in its service.

Right now, Twitter’s real-time search engine uses technology from Summize, which it bought in 2008.

And, simply put, it remains pretty lousy–with an index that only holds tweets from a few days and has no massive archive.

In fact, results have been better from others, such as Google and the Microsoft (MSFT) Bing search service, both of which did deals to license Twitter’s flood of tweets about a year ago.

And Google recently upped the ante with its dedicated real-time search offering, made up, in large part, of Twitter’s index archive and including a coolio timeline.

It is long past time for Twitter to keep up here, in terms of simple innovation, given these tweets are its own content.

What would be interesting to see is if Twitter needed the help of a search giant such as Google or Microsoft to help power such a service–sources said its execs had been putting feelers out many months ago on the subject of such aid.

Then again, it could all be home built, too.

In any case, let’s hope Twitter gives its tweets the respect they deserve.

Or else introduces its own mobile device called the Tweetphone that vibrates every time you are mentioned on Twitter.

Until then, here is the video of the very funny “Tweet Tweet” rap song from Jimmy Kimmel and Drake that debuted in late June:

Twitter says that Tweetie, which sells for $2.99 in Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes store, will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and distributed free in the coming weeks. An iPad app is in the works, the company says.

The purchase is going to give Twitter Kremlinologists another reason to pore over Wednesday’s blog post from Twitter investor and board member Fred Wilson, for clues about the company’s next move.

Wilson’s much discussed post argues in part that Twitter, which has traditionally relied on third-party developers to build cool stuff for the service, should be building that stuff itself. Or buying the companies that do.

Wilson specifically cited Tweetie as one of the companies that is “filling holes in the Twitter product.”  Twitter purchased Summize, another company Wilson lumped in that category, in 2008.

Wilson also described TwitPic, a Twitter-centric photo service, as a hole-filler. So if you connect the dots, you might conclude that Twitter intends to buy TwitPic or create its own photo uploader.

Another theory that isn’t mutually exclusive: Now that Twitter owns a client for the iPhone and has officially endorsed a client for Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry, it will look to establish a beachhead with other mobile platforms. The most obvious would be Google’s (GOOG) Android.

All that said, I’m not totally convinced that Wilson meant to use his post as a buy/build roadmap. To me, it reads a bit like someone trying to win a debate–perhaps with Twitter’s founders–about the best way to run the company going forward. And I have a feeling we’ll be coming back to this idea over the next few days.

John Borthwick, who funded bit.ly via his Betaworks investment group, explains the details of his offer here, along with a bit of pro forma condolence for the demise of his competitor: “Sad day yesterday to see tr.im announce that they are shutting their doors, after failing to make a business of a nice service with a great URL.”

To me, that sounds a bit like a mafia don shaking his head a tad wistfully after hearing that one his old rivals got bumped off, then sending a big bouquet to the funeral. And I think that the tr.im team, as well as some of bit.ly’s other competitors, may take it in the same vein.

UPDATE: I spoke to Eric Woodward, CEO of Tr.im’s parent company Nambu Networks. As I thought, he’s uninterested in working with Bit.ly, either directly or via 301works, the third party archive Borthwick has proposed. His response: “Why would I want to upload all my of data to Bit.ly?” When I suggested that this might be a good move for his users, he allowed that it still might happen — if he can’t find a buyer for Tr.im. And that’s a distinct possiblity: Woodward said he has been looking for a buyer for the past few months, without success.

But Borthwick’s proposal also sounds like a good one to me. I’ll let the wiser Webheads explain whether it’s a real solution for the problem that tr.im’s failure will create for the Web, namely, the notion that lots of Web addresses, shortened for use in social Web services like Facebook and Twitter, will stop working one day.

And if you do think it’s a real problem and not just an annoyance for the service’s users, as well as for Web sites that got referral traffic from the service, then someone’s going to need to think of something. We’re going to see more of this.

That’s because if there is any business at all in URL-shortening, it’s going to be a scale business that ends up in the hands of a couple competitors, max. Just like search. And that means that dozens of mom-and-pop competitors (here’s a visual snapshot, taken last fall, of 117 URL-shorteners) are going to fall by the wayside.

Right now Bit.ly looks to be the Google (GOOG) of URL-shortening, and there is some griping that it got that status unfairly, via a deal with Twitter that made it the service’s default shortener last May (type a long Web address into the message box on Twitter’s Web page, and the service will automatically convert it into a bit.ly link–like this). Not true, says Borthwick–the Twitter deal helped, but it’s not responsible for the majority of Bit.ly’s traffic.

But there’s no reason for Borthwick, Bit.ly or Twitter to be defensive about the deal. If Twitter wants to pick a preferred vendor/partner/developer for any or all of its services, it should do so. It’s not going to do that very often; one of the main reasons that Twitter has taken off is the ecosystem of developers who have built innovative stuff using the service’s open architecture, and it won’t want to discourage that.

And if Twitter wants to work with someone it’s already doing business with–prior to Twitter’s most recent funding round, Betaworks owned a sizable slug of Twitter’s stock, via Twitter’s acquisition of Betaworks portfolio company Summize a year ago–there’s no problem with that, either.

In any case, the Bit.ly/Betaworks guys have other things to worry about. They still need to figure out how to take the data stream they’re mining from all those tiny Web addresses they’re making and do something useful/valuable with it.

Then again, so does Twitter.

ComScore says Twitter logged 30.1 million search queries in May, more than Time Warner Cable (TWC), but not even on the same playing field as search also-rans like Ask.com.

But what if comScore is dramatically undercounting Twitter’s search–not just the standard undercounting that Web publishers always complain about, but something more significant?

It’s a given that comScore is undercounting. I know this because the research outfit told me so: The company confirmed today that it only measures searches executed at Twitter.com. But at least half of Twitter’s users are accessing the service without visiting the site, via third-party clients like Tweetdeck. And within that group of users is the power-user set, which is far more likely to be executing searches, many times a day in some cases, than Oprah fans who just joined the service last month.

So it’s easy enough to conclude that the majority of Twitter’s searches are going uncounted by comScore (SCOR). But how big is the gap? I’ve asked Twitter to share its search numbers, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. (UPDATE: See bottom of post)

In the meantime, let’s do some guesstimating.

Start with this year-old post by John Borthwick of Betaworks, who at the time was an investor in Summize, a Twitter search engine at the time (Twitter later bought Summize outright).

Borthwick reports seeing a huge number of search queries on Twitter on the opening day of Apple’s (AAPL) 2008 developer conference, topping out at an average of 190 queries per second. Tease that out over a full day, and you get 16.4 million searches in 24 hours.

For argument’s sake, let’s say that most of those searches occurred in an eight-hour stretch before, during and after Steve Jobs’s pronouncements that day, and knock that total down by two-thirds, to something like 5.5 million queries.

Steve Jobs pronouncements are rare things so it would be wrong to assume that Twitter sees similar usage patterns every day. But then again, Twitter has had an insane growth spurt in the last year: The most recent comScore traffic numbers peg monthly visitors at 32 million world-wide, up from a couple million a year ago.

See where this is going? Again, for argument’s sake, let’s say that Twitter’s peak traffic a year ago is now close to daily traffic today, and extrapolate that 5.5 million query guesstimate out for a month: You get something closer to 165 million queries.

Want to tweak any of my assumptions above? Be my guest. But no matter how you cut it, I’m sure that Twitter’s real search numbers are going to be several times higher than comScore’s number, at the very least.

Again, this matters in the end because Twitter’s most compelling investment thesis is that it can provide real-time search. And for that to mean something, the company is going to have to start registering as an actual search competitor at some point, not just to Time Warner Cable but to Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) or even Google (GOOG). So how close, or far away, is that from happening?

UPDATE: Twitter cofounder Biz Stone responds, but declines to hand out any numbers. No surprise. I am a bit surprised to see him play down the importance of search at Twitter. I wonder if his investors are also surprised.

We don’t share absolute data such as total requests or queries per day but we do look at the whole ecosystem when we measure these things (not just Twitter.com).

Also, we are focused on the sharing and discovery of tweets so comparing Twitter to web search is interesting but not necessarily how we would measure success.

Meet the Internet’s It Boys: Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. A year ago their “micromessaging” platform was unknown outside of a small circle of digerati. Now the service has broken through to the mainstream, or at least to the mainstream media (thanks, Oprah!). But while Twitter has no problem generating attention, it’s still unclear how the company will actually generate revenue. Or maybe it doesn’t need to do that: Last year Facebook offered to buy Twitter for $500 million in cash and stock, and the service could presumably garner a much higher price today–perhaps from Microsoft (MSFT) or Google (GOOG). Or at least that’s what its investors may be hoping for.

Session Highlights

Live Blog

• After Kara Swisher assists Jill Sobule with a song penned for (and about) Rupert Murdoch, Walt Mossberg joins her on the stage and they thank the audience. “We double-mean it this year,” says Walt.
• Walt and Kara explain their “Web 3.0″ thesis, which you can find explained in detail here. They also plug the new All Things Digital iphone app (which is excellent!) and run through a series of less helpful iPhone apps–less helpful because they don’t exist. The Carol Bartz app gets some applause.
• Walt: It’s all about apps. Apple (AAPL) dominates that business but we will show some other great stuff at this conference. Kara: Normally we start out with big-company CEOs, but instead, we’re going to bring out the company that everyone is talking about. Here are Biz Stone and Evan Williams of Twitter.
• Kara shows off a video that depicts her mother’s low opinion of Twitter. Well worth watching.
• Walt: We also have real data about people’s opinions re: digital media, commissioned by an actual polling firm–Penn, Schoen & Berland. For instance, only 51 percent of Twitter users are on the service once a month. What’s the deal with that?

• Evan: That’s fair. We know it’s in its infancy. There are lots of ways to fix the adoption curve that we know how to do.
• Evan explains the history of Twitter. He sold Blogger to Google, hired Biz, started Odeo, a podcasting company. Walt: “Which got crushed by Apple.”
• Biz: I followed Evan to Odeo, and we started working with Jack Dorsey, who had this idea that just involved IM-like status updates that could update via mobile. To Ev’s credit, as CEO of Odeo, he sent us off to work on that.
• Evan: A few months later, at Odeo, we just didn’t see a bright future for that. Generally, if I’m not personally invested in the product, and don’t use it myself…
• Biz: I started playing with Twitter and I started laughing at Evan’s posts and thought that was a good sign.

• Evan: It was so simple. “It didn’t look like a real thing. The simplicity turned off some of our engineers. It wasn’t obvious at all.
• Walt: How many users do you have? Biz and Ev won’t comment.
• Evan: We wound down Odeo, returned the money to investors and made them whole and went off to focus on Twitter.
• Walt points out that most users don’t use the Twitter.com interface. Biz: We have at least twice as much usage via the open API and other clients as we do via Twitter.com.
• Walt: Is that good thing? Evan: Yes. Very much so. We’ve never built an iPhone app, but there are at least a dozen of them. You can’t win by trying to corral everything in. We have all these people adding value. We can’t build all the stuff people want with 45 people.

• Biz: Openness, open platforms are a big deal. We’re seeing lots of this. And people communicating on these open platforms is a big deal. It’s not just with communication. It’s with open-source software, transparency at companies, etc. People are building a ton of value this way.
• Evan: This openness helped create Summize, the search engine we bought a year ago. That couldn’t have happened if we weren’t open with our data. Turns out there’s a huge opportunity with search, and we hadn’t foreseen that.
• Walt: Will future projects and developments happen on Web pages or on clients/apps?
• Evan: We’re interface-agnostic. We’re more concerned about what the data is and that it should flow to all clients. I don’t think we’ll build a desktop app, but we will tweak the Web site a bit.
• Kara: Everyone’s talking about real-time search. But what kind of real business opportunity is available there?
• Evan: Real-time search means different things on different platforms. On Google, it’s Web search. On Twitter, it’s Twitter search. It’s different from what other people are talking about when they’re talking about real-time search. One of Twitter’s properties is that it’s low-latency, and speed is important in information dissemination.
• Kara: So what’s the value in that? What’s the advertising premise for that?
• Biz: When I think about search, I think about a box and a button. When I think about Twitter, I zoom out a bit, and I think of discovery.

• Walt: Is there a way to sell that?
• Biz: Pfft….There’s a way to make introductions to people, to tell them that things and people are available on Twitter, and there’s certainly money in that.
• Walt cites another piece of polling data: 30 percent say they’d be willing to see banner advertising on Twitter. Does that work for you guys?
• Evan: I think it’s probably the least interesting thing we can do.
• Kara: So you’re least interested in doing it?
• Evan: Yeah.
• Walt: 24 percent say they’d pay for power accounts. Do you think that’s a good idea?
• Evan: Yes, I think it’s a good idea. We’ve talked about it for a long time. Here’s how it might work: Lots of commercial users are on Twitter already. That’s not odd, and it’s happening successfully already. But we could give those users tools to make it better. For instance, here’s how P&G (PG) might sell Tide…Wait that’s a bad idea. How about The Wall Street Journal? No, they’re a media company; that won’t work either. How about Dunkin’ Donuts? People like Dunkin’ Donuts. They have an affinity for that, and they’re already following Dunkin’ Donuts. So one thing we can do is tell new users that the Dunkin’ Donuts account on Twitter is actually Dunkin’ Donuts. To verify that.
• Walt: OK, what else could you do with that?

• Evan: There’s a million ways, if you’re doing this in real time, to make this useful, and it won’t be annoying to people because if they don’t want that information, they won’t subscribe to a particular account.
• Biz on hype: We realize that this constant stream of attention will eventually go away. We have to keep concentrating on the company. “We’re one percent into Twitter.”
• Kara: You’ve raised a lot of money. You’ve had a lot of interest from acquirers. Why didn’t you sell to Facebook?
• Evan: I have a big thing about building sustainable companies. And I think that’s what Twitter should be.
• Walt: So in five years you won’t have sold this? You’ll still be running it?
• Evan: Yes. I didn’t expect to be working on this when I spun Twitter out of Odeo. But I came back to it because it was the most interesting thing I could work on.
• Kara: Do you have Zuckerberg-like control of your company, where you have the ability to control your fate and turn down a $1 billion offer from the likes of Microsoft?
• Evan. Yes. And the board feels the same way.
• Walt: You sure your board doesn’t want to sell the company within five years?
• Evan: Sequoia likes to brag about YouTube. But they also aspire to start companies like Apple and other cool companies. I think VCs like to brag about starting big awesome companies.
• Biz: When we met Bijan Sabet at Spark, I remember telling Ev that I liked him a lot. And Ev met him and said “he’s a little too nice.” Then we met the rest of the guys. [Pause]. And then we were in.
• Kara: What’s next big delta for you, the next big innovation?
• Evan. We’re not doing a TV show. We look at that like an iPhone platform that can have apps on it, but we’re not doing a show ourselves.
• Biz: I think the next big thing is scaling this company.
• Evan: Definitely scaling the company. We’re 45 people. We need to make the product better, we need to solve the awareness-to-engagement ramp. We also want to deepen the value proposition. There are lots of head-slapping things we can do to improve the product.
• Walt: I was Twitter skeptic. But I really go into it when my colleague Katie told me that this was an interesting way to keep up with news. Is that something you can build on?
• Evan: That’s the big secret for people like Kara’s mom, and we can do a better job of explaining that. Twitter disseminates information and it builds relationships. You can do one or both of those things.
• Kara: Do you need to raise more money?
• Evan: Well, we need to start building a monetizable business.
• Kara: When does that begin?
• Evan: There will be a moment when we turn something on.

• Time for Q&A: Roger McNamee from Elevation Partners begs the guys not to do midday planned maintenance outages. He also asks them to scale faster and to hire more than 45 people.
• Evan: Go to Twitter.com, and you’ll see that we’re hiring. We’re not planning on staying at 45 people.
• Q: What do you think will be key way you bring in money in a couple of years?
• Biz: You need to leave room for emergence to take place. We’re doing that in the way we structure the company and the way we hire people, etc. I’ve always said that if we described Twitter in three sentences, the first two would be about not putting too much fidelity on it, and the last sentence would be “we don’t know.”
• Q: What about an Apple-like App Store for Twitter, where you guys could sort and authenticate apps?
• Biz: I think exposing apps to people would be a good idea. I don’t know about charging for it. We know that certain apps make Twitter work much better for people, and we should promote them and point people to them. “I would like to do that right now. I don’t know how soon we’ll get to it.”
• Q: Not really a question, but a plea to not abuse the access to personal data that Twitter already has.
• Evan: We know not kill the goose. There are things that we could do that would be really stupid, and that would be dangerous, but those aren’t even the most tempting things to do.
• Q: In traditional media and marketing, we have tools to prove the value of different tools. How to tell marketing clients that they’re reaching the right audience, etc.?
• Biz: Start by typing their name in Twitter search and showing them how many people are talking about their product. They’ll immediately want to respond. That’s the easy answer.
• Q: What about looking at Nielsen-like partners to help refine metrics and tell marketers who’s looking at what?
• Biz: There are lots of interesting things we could do. I think that it will be more compelling when you’re not just following a set list of people. Twitter will be more interesting when it starts telling you things like “You go to Whole Foods a lot…maybe you’d like to know that this is on sale today, etc.”
• Evan: But it will always be recipient-driven.
• Walt: Biz, please tell me about your name.
• Biz: I couldn’t pronounce my name, which was Christopher Isaac Stone, and I said “bzzz” and that was that.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090526/biz-stone-and-evan-williams/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090209/does-real-time-search-make-twitter-a-google-killer-its-fanbots-think-so-boomtown-not-quite-yet/ http://allthingsd.com/20090209/does-real-time-search-make-twitter-a-google-killer-its-fanbots-think-so-boomtown-not-quite-yet/#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:38:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=9490

According the latest meme to sweep the digerati over the last several days, here are the words that should make the brainiac satraps over at Google very, very nervous: “See what’s happening–right now.”

That’s the motto right below the box on Twitter’s search engine–a page that looks awfully familiar to anyone who uses the Internet, since it is essentially a light-blue-colored rip-off of Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” mantra.

But, posits the new theory, it’s Google (GOOG) that should perhaps not be feeling so lucky when it comes to Twitter search because it is becoming the place for what is now being called “real-time” search.

Yesterday there was a Silicon Alley Insider piece alarmingly titled “Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction?” by former AOLer John Borthwick–who should know a thing or two about the topic, given that he was a top exec at the once-vaunted online service as it imploded.

In it, relating a presentation to AOL execs in their heyday by the well-known management author, Clay Christensen, here’s Borthwick’s money quote:

[Christensen] said time and time again disruptive business confuse adjacent innovation for disruptive innovation. They think they are still disrupting when they are just innovating on the same theme that they began with. As a consequence they miss the grass roots challenger–the real disruptor to their business. The company who is disrupting their business doesn’t look relevant to the billion dollar franchise, it’s often scrappy and unpolished, it looks like a sideline business, and often its business model is TBD. With the AOL story now unraveled–I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL.”

Having written an entire book about the disaster that became AOL, I would have to disagree a lot with Borthwick that the innovation of broadband killed the company.

For example, I would have started with AOL’s ponzi-scheme of an advertising business model, gross mismanagement, greed, backstabbing between Time Warner (TWX) and AOL after the merger and a complete noninterest in innovation in AOL’s later years as the key reasons for its demise, before I even got to broadband.

That aside, Borthwick does go on to make an interesting argument I have been hearing a lot of late among the digerati: that Twitter’s search results–and not its often-inane tweets–are its real treasure.

An investor in a start-up called Summize that was acquired by Twitter and is now its search engine, Borthwick correctly focuses on some interesting splintering off of two key search areas, video and real-time search.

Google already owns plain-vanilla search in a game-over way, with a disturbing share that just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

And, given Google’s ownership of YouTube and the fact that the online video service massively dominates the online video market, the search giant effectively owns video search. (One might note that it has been, heretofore ineffectively, hard at work trying to monetize it.)

But it is Twitter, as it quickly increases its user base from one million to three million to six million–and, doubtlessly, millions more now–that is the king of real-time search, which is to say, search that is done as news events unfold (the plane in the Hudson River, an earthquake, the Super Bowl, whatever) or other ongoing topics of the day.

Thus, while Google essentially controls the pages of about everything on the Internet, Twitter owns the social conversation online.

Writes Borthwick:

Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson–today–weeks after the event, Google is replete with results–but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues–lipstick on pig?–for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch–on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set.”

Unfortunately, after that, except just stating that Google will inevitably fall over and die, because of the Twitter effect, Borthwick provides absolutely no explanation of what possible business model could make real-time search that kind of killer.

Will it be a text-based online advertising model like Google’s AdSense? Or are people who Twitter and search Twitter not as open to such ads when they are conversing?

Or could Twitter sell the analytics from these social searches to big brands, so they can do a deep dive into consumer behavior? Or is the bulk of that chatter–like, say, “Cheetos are yummy, but messy”–completely useless to them?

Does Twitter winning in real-time search mean no one wants regular Web search anymore? Or can both co-exist and be lucrative?

“Who knows?” is probably a better answer to all of this at this point, given how nascent and small the Twitter audience–save for in the noisy echo chamber of Silicon Valley and the media, where it looms large–still is.

That’s not to say I don’t use Twitter search more and more or that it’s probably a whole lot easier to monetize the start-up’s search than the content of its 140 characters.

Said a Twitter insider who is watching its search business grow a lot and notes that it is much bigger than people realize: “The search results are distinct to anything out there.”

That is true, and I would also say it is extremely useful too (even though bigger will inevitably make it less so, as there will be more dreck to slog through).

That’s why Facebook, as first reported here, made that $500 million run at Twitter and also why it opened its APIs on status this week to slow Twitter’s growth and cut its momentum a bit.

But Facebook also made the move to help itself. After all, many more young people–for all Twitter’s buzz–use its status update (ask some–I did), so it is in Facebook’s interest to keep it that way.

Of course, Google could also try to kill Twitter, by starting its own real-time search service, although that is the kind of innovative and viral thing that big companies usually cannot pull off as easily or deftly.

And it would come as no surprise if Google made an even larger bid for Twitter, given its interest in owning all search.

Or not, if Twitter can’t find a way to make real and sustained money from any of its many interesting parts, like search.

I, for one, hope it does, since it’d be nice to see someone tweet, um, tweak, the mighty Google for once, even if it does not have murder in mind.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090209/does-real-time-search-make-twitter-a-google-killer-its-fanbots-think-so-boomtown-not-quite-yet/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20081117/twitters-bloggers-praise-motrin-for-giving-them-something-to-do-last-weekend/ http://allthingsd.com/20081117/twitters-bloggers-praise-motrin-for-giving-them-something-to-do-last-weekend/#comments Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:02:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1126 Good thing we’ve resolved the global financial crisis, the global terror crisis, and the global warming crisis. Otherwise the blogosphere wouldn’t have had time to rail about a Web video ad campaign from Motrin over the weekend.

The story: Big pharma Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) has rolled out a Web clip (below) in which a snarky, knowing commentator gripes about the social pressure to “wear” babies in slings, carriers, etc–and the Motrin-ready aches that “wearing” a baby can cause. And in the last few days lots of blogger/Twitterers have agreed that:

• The ad is offensive.
• Motrin/JNJ doesn’t “get” social marketing.
• Something should be done! Maybe a boycott.

How many bloggers/Twitterers are actually complaining about this? And are there enough to hurt JNJ, which made an estimated $1 billion in profit from Motrin each year? Mmmmmmaybe.

Tools like Google’s blog search and Twitter’s Summize search will tell you that, yes, some number of people are chattering about this on the Web. And as of 8:07 a.m. Monday, the Motrin.com site was down, whatever that means. But from what I can tell, only a few thousand people have actually seen the ad on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. I’ve asked video watcher TubeMogul for info on the ad’s audience and will update when I get it.

But even if the outrage is widespread, it’s going to be hard make a connection between online chatter and real-world results. Otherwise Ron Paul would be the 44th President of the United States.

Meanwhile, at the risk of a cyber-stoning, let me say that I don’t think the ad–which seems to be aiming at the same set of people who buy very expensive strollers but feel a bit conflicted about doing so–is an outrage. And neither does the person who does most of the baby-wearing in my house.

I ran it by her in the twilight hours this morning, between feedings, and she shrugged: “It’s true.” Then she went back to sleep.

UPDATE: Twitter Moms unite! JNJ has apologized, and is very, very sorry. Kathy Widmer sends Forbes.com this mea culpa:

I am the Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Consumer Healthcare. I have responsibility for the Motrin Brand, and am responding to concerns about recent advertising on our website. I am, myself, a mom of 3 daughters. We certainly did not mean to offend moms through our advertising. Instead, we had intended to demonstrate genuine sympathy and appreciation for all that parents do for their babies. We believe deeply that moms know best and we sincerely apologize for disappointing you. Please know that we take your feedback seriously and will take swift action with regard to this ad. We are in process of removing it from our website. It will take longer, unfortunately, for it to be removed from magazine print as it is currently on newstands and in distribution.”

Lesson: Carping on Twitter does indeed work. Sometimes.

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